


wrong's your wrong, and right's your right

by toujours_nigel



Series: Conditions Best Suited [4]
Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Gen, Timestamp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-10
Updated: 2015-06-10
Packaged: 2018-04-03 19:51:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4112875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Timestamp for The Thousandth Man, later that evening.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wrong's your wrong, and right's your right

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lilliburlero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/gifts).



In the event he hadn’t had to ask. He’d lurked till Ralph had gone past, his carriage superb, doing an excellent imitation of a man who barely knew how many eyes were upon him and emphatically did not care, and then lunged in before the door had properly closed, putting his shoulder to it. It never locked rightly, he’d known that since Jack had occupied the study going on eight years ago. Ralph had fallen back before the intrusion, painfully blank-faced, and they had stood looking at each other with scant inches between them. Poor old Ralph, Hugh had thought, he looked positively battered. Bags under his eyes and every muscle drawn tight to breaking.

“Come to take possession,” Ralph had said lightly, turning away, and Hugh wanted to say _yes_ , tuck Ralph under his shoulder and care for him like a sick little twirp away from home. He shouldn’t have had to bear it alone, some friend should have looked after him.

Then he had seen, too late, what Ralph had meant. “He’s given you the sack.”

“Tomorrow, when the Head comes.”

Hugh had had nothing to say to that, all his cheer and conspiracies cut away and he himself cut to the core had stood looking at Ralph too long, too hard, and Ralph had said, finally, that he _ought to go, please, Hugh_ , and that his voice had trembled on the last word with the tension of a spring wound tight, too tight, to the point of tissues fraying, that had propelled Hugh into movement, a furtive glance to check that the door was truly locked, a rush up to enfold Ralph in his arms and crush him, then a swift and sloppy retreat. Outside he had paused for a moment with a hand over his eyes before continuing down the corridor to his own study, there to meet a panicking Carter and send word back to Ralph about it.

He had seen Odell emerge from the study some time later, truly by coincidence, looking shaken, stirred, savaged, lit up like some fey child and not stolid little Odell at all. In the morning he had insisted upon his absent rights to see Ralph to the station and had wanted to do something babyish like refusing to hand his trunk over.

* * *

 

There is time for all this driving home, with Ralph quiet beside him and a decorous eighteen inches of space between them. Having once given himself over, Ralph makes none of the protests Hugh has been dreading, but comes along quietly after dinner, throwing his duffel into the dickie and folding himself into the backseat with a species of complacence that drags cruel claws through memory and brings it gasping up: just such a look, in the study or in the bogs after cricket or by the pool while the lower fourth bathed and they dawdled or over dinner one of the rare vacs he had come to stay with Hugh. Back in quarters, with Viju having set a spare room to rights and retired grumbling, he surprises a different look that he has no memory of that makes breath rattle in his throat and his body tense with an awful waiting, but Ralph simply sits in the rattan chair by the window and looks out into the wet night and smiles briefly when Hugh giving in to inevitability crosses to sit at his feet and tip his head sighing back onto Ralph’s knee.

They aren’t schoolboys anymore, even if they had self-deceptively been in their last year together, upper-sixth and looking desperately outward to university and what they had fondly dubbed the real world, and they had not in any case long persevered in the rough affections boys classify everywhere as horse-play, Ralph too aware of his proclivities and Hugh himself too aware of Ralph to lend the matter any ease. This quiet sort of thing once in a long while, when they’d sat the night talking or it was a birthday or someone was ill or Jeepers had been more oily and unctuous than his wont. Hugh suspects it had been worse than any amount of jostling on the carpet, and if it hadn’t been then it is now. Eight months he’s been in this country with nobody he knows, only letters from home and twice laborious trunk calls crackling with static and the very breath of a voice, and now this, Ralph’s hand in his hair, Ralph’s bulk behind him, and the thigh tensing and relaxing carefully under his head. If he turns his head to look there will be that awful soft look still on Ralph’s face, and it will be more than he knows what to do with and he doesn’t want it, wants to slump here and feel tension leech from his limbs while the rain washes the world clean. Tomorrow evening they can go down to the beach in twilight time and Ralph can hold forth about sedimentary rocks and he can make futile passes at the fisherwomen.

“I made his life living hell,” he admits, still looking away. “Pitched him down the stairs, broke his leg.”

Ralph pauses, and his hand when it resumes stroking is harder, pushier, pressing Hugh’s head closer to him, flattening his ear. “Is that why his parents took him away? Punching below your weight class, Hugh.”

“Not Hazell,” he says, and turns his head to look up into Ralph’s austere, closed-off expression. “Don’t be idiotic. Jeepers. Soaped the stairs, went down like a log. Harris Minor shouted timber and did lines for the next week.”

Ralph laughs. Laughs and laughs like something’s burst in him, jiggles about in the chair, curls up to one side and then the other, pushes Hugh trembling sliding slipping on from the outer edge to between his thighs, reaches down and grasps him, all twisted about and awkward, by the shoulders and shakes him. His face is pink underneath the tan, and his hair and eyes are vivid against it, and his mouth is pink and smiling. “Hugh,” he says, “my very dear dear man. I wish you’d a photograph or something.”

“Fairly sure Stoney took one and circulated copies,” he says, just to keep his mouth busy. If I was queer, he thinks, desperately, we’d kiss, and it would all be easy.


End file.
